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Lions tight end Tony Scheffler has this pass knocked away from him by the Packers' Jerron McMillian during today's loss at Ford Field. / KIRTHMON F. DOZIER/DFP

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The final play saw Calvin Johnson trying to lateral the ball and tossing it, inadvertently, to a Green Bay defender. The guy went off dancing as Johnson splayed on the ground.

Pack wins. Lions eat the turf. It was close. It was tight. But it ended, as six of Detroit’s 10 games have ended this season, badly. And it felt like something more than one more loss.

It felt like a finish.

You could hear it in the clipped voice of Matthew Stafford, forced to remember a day he’d like to forget. You could see it in the frustration of coaches yelling on the sideline. You could spot it in the tightened jaw of Jim Schwartz, who can have an edge when a loss is merely a setback. This time he seemed to need a long, deep breath, one that he, like many Lions fans, couldn’t quite find.

What happens to a dream deferred? A poet asked that once. And while there was no poetry in today’s 24-20 loss, you could feel the weight of the Lions’ deferred 2012 dreams coming down on their heads like a theater curtain that snaps off its rods. They were not supposed to be the last-place team in their division. They were not supposed to lose to Minnesota on the road and then Green Bay at home, the 13th loss in 14 games to the Packers.

Those were the old Lions, right? Those were days gone by. These were the days ahead.

Weren’t they?

Instead you had Cliff Avril saying, “We let it get away from us,” and Justin Durant saying, “They made more plays than we did,” and Stafford saying, “I have to play better to give us a chance to win” and we know, we know, we have heard these sentences before — from previous Lions teams that frustrated themselves almost as much as they frustrated their fans.

“It sucks in multiple ways,” Johnson said.

OK. I admit. That’s a new one.

A different way to lose

The worst part of today’s loss may be this: After nearly three months of playing Cardiac Kids, the Lions flipped the script. They went limp at the end and the opponent ripped through them. Detroit, normally behind late, actually was ahead from the third quarter on, after a beautiful— if fortunate — Stafford to Johnson 25-yard connection to make it 17-14.

They took that lead into the fourth quarter. They increased that lead in the fourth quarter. They just didn’t finish with that lead in the fourth quarter.

Instead, the offense went gasless. It was 10 yards from the Green Bay end zone with 5:21 left. Mikel Leshoure ran on first down for three yards.

And that — until the game’s last, meaningless play — would be the final yards Detroit would gain.

The final yards? With more than five minutes to go?

“We score seven there, it’s a whole different ball game,” Stafford said. True. But it’s always a whole different ball game in one’s head. On the field, the best fourth-quarter offense in the NFL went flat in the fourth quarter. And the defense — which had been pretty darn aggressive all day — picked the worst time to join a Southwest Airlines “Want to Get Away?” commercial.

Aaron Rogers threaded them with a crossing route to Jermichael Finley, who slipped through, oh, let’s say, a million Lions tacklers to pick up 40 yards.

Moments later, Rogers lofted a 22-yard pass to young Randall Cobb, who caught it in the end zone despite two Lions defenders, mostly because Cobb was the only one actually looking at the ball.

“We played poor on that drive,” Schwartz said. “We had a great opportunity on defense to be able to get a stop and we didn’t get it done.”

“Disarray is probably not the right word,” Stafford said when asked. “Coming into this week we were the No. 2 offense in the league. So if that’s disarray, OK. We didn’t play our best against a good football team.”

Right. Remember, the Packers — not very long ago a Super Bowl champion — had won four straight coming in. But that was all the more reason the Lions needed to beat them. Detroit had to prove itself worthy. It had to show it belonged in the playoff conversation — and not just in preseason magazines. The Packers were missing Clay Matthews, Greg Jennings, Charles Woodson. Huge impact players.

But they still got it done. The Lions, with their star names on the field, did not.

Dream deferred, likely until next year. Either they are underperformers or they were overhyped. Doesn’t really matter. The bloom is off the rose. So are the petals. The Lions, technically still alive at 4-6, are now merely a stem. A thorny one at that.

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